Detection Of Task Difficulty And The Startup Characteristics Of The Negative Priming Effect Of A Single Start

Negative priming refers to the phenomenon that if a stimulus is to be ignored in the first trial (the prime trial) and then presented as the target in the consecutive trial (the probe trial) responses are slow. People use varieties of the stimuli and tasks to investigate the negative priming effect, and this effect may reveals the process of the selective attention. In a conventional negative-priming paradigm, there are two trials, a prime trial and a probe trial, and selective attention is required in both prime and probe trials. Recently, people found that when a single prime stimulus was presented as the prime briefly, and Participants were not informed about the presence of the primes, the negative priming effect was still observed, this was called single-prime negative priming. Despite extensive evidence in favor of the NP effect, the underlying mechanisms continue to be hotly debated today. The two most popular theories about NP are the inhibition account and the episodic retrieval account. Which theory can be better used to explain the single-prime negative priming? In current study, we explored the impact of the time, the difficulty of the probe task and the prime features on the single-prime negative priming, which would provide experimental evidence to the mechanism of single-prime negative priming.There are three experiments in this study. The experiment 1 was used stoop stimuli to examine whether the difficulty of the probe task and the time affect the single-prime negative priming. The result indicated that, single-prime negative priming was present when the SOA was long, and disappeared when the SOA was short. In addition, we didn't find the impact of the difficulty of the probe task on single-prime negative priming. In experiment 2, we changed the feature of the prime as the probe target to explore the impact on single-prime negative priming. We found that, when the features of the prime as the probe target the positive priming occurred and not negative priming. The experiment 3 based on the experiment 2 used underline to distinguish the target and the distracter, to explore the impact of the prime feature on single-prime negative priming again. The result was liked experiment 2 showed that the feature of the prime influence on single-prime negative priming. Positive priming was present when the feature of the prime as the probe target, and negative priming was present when the feature of the prime as the probe distract.According to the three experiments, there are several conclusions:First, Experiment 1 demonstrated that single-prime negative priming is not affected by the difficulty of the probe task, but affected by the time and the memory load. As the result of the memory load, while single-prime negative priming was observed only when the time was long. In other word, it was possible that inhibition of the prime required attentive resource. Results of experiment 2 and experiment 3 indicated that the impact of the prime feature on single-prime negative priming was the key factor. Participant would automatically look at the prime and showed positive priming when the prime feature was similar to the probe target. However, they would ignore the prime and presented negative priming when the prime feature as the probe distract. Moreover, all the results of the there experiments can be explained by inhibition theory, and provided experimental evidence for it.